April 15, 2015

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Domo – The Hot New Visualization Stealth Startup

by Ravi Kalakota

Domo seems to be hottest emerging company in the visualization, BI and so-called “Business Management Platform” area. I have been seeing it at several clients recently.

According to their pitch.. “Domo is the future of business management. For all the trillions spent on technology solutions, the way we do business still feels pretty painful. Data lives everywhere. Insights arrive too slowly. Collaboration is still wildly inefficient. Until now. Domo puts the right information, at the right time, into the hands of the people that actually use it to collaborate and make decisions. And it’s transforming the way people manage business.”

Domo grabs live business data from some 300 different sources — Salesforce, NetSuite, Twitter and Facebook included — and presents the data in a live interactive dashboard that can be customized and mixed and matched in all kinds of ways.

A screenshot of is shown below (courtesy of Recode).

Given the 2 bln valuation and growing hype, I have been struggling to figure out what Domo does that Tableau Software can’t do. Domo claims to bring the business and all its data together in one intuitive platform. Doesn’t every BI and Data Visualization platform do this? Domo claims to be developed hundreds of proprietary connectors (traditional data sources and cloud based) that connect directly to any source of data across your entire organization, and bring it into one intuitive platform. Again so does everyone else.

Recode explains this in the following manner…”Domo is not just an application but a platform, which means that if there’s some specialized business app that Domo hasn’t connected to yet, you can now start building your own connections to it and bring that data in. Those individual sections of data in the shot above are called “cards,” and you can rearrange them and add new ones to your view all the time. But if you need a special card that combines a few different bits of data and which hasn’t already been built, Domo today announced a feature it calls Card Builder that lets you create your own.”

Defining Business Analytics

What is Business Analytics? Business Analytics is the intersection of business and technology, offering new opportunities for a competitive advantage. Business analytics unlocks the predictive potential of data analysis to improve financial performance, strategic management, and operational efficiency.

What is BI? BI is the "computer-based techniques used in spotting, digging-out, and analyzing 'hard' business data, such as sales revenue by products or departments or associated costs and incomes. Objectives of BI implementations include (1) understanding of a firm's internal and external strengths and weaknesses, (2) understanding of the relationship between different data for better decision making, (3) detection of opportunities for innovation, and (4) cost reduction and optimal deployment of resources." (Business Dictionary). Most widely used BI tool is Microsoft Excel.
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What is Big Data? Big data refer to data scenarios that grow so large (petabytes and more) that they become awkward to work with using traditional database management tools. The challenge stems from data volume + flow velocity + noise to signal conversion. Big data is spawning new tools that are mix of significant processing power, parallelism and statistical, machine learning, or pattern recognition techniques
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Corporate performance management software and performance management concepts, such as the balanced scorecard, enable organizations to measure business results and track their progress against business goals in order to improve financial performance.
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Data visualization tools, include mashups, executive dashboards, performance scorecards and other data visualization technology, is becoming a major category.
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BI platforms provide a range of capabilities for building analytical applications. Examples are Oracle OBIEE, SAP Business Objects 4.0. There are many choices and combinations of BI platforms, capabilities and use cases as well as many emerging BI technologies such as in memory analytics, interactive visualization and BI integrated search. The idea of standardizing on one supplier for all of one’s BI capabilities is difficult to do. Increasingly, standardization and more about managing a portfolio of tools used for a set of capabilities and use cases.
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Data integration tools and architectures in support of BI continue to evolve. Extract-Transfer-Load (ETL) tools make up a big segment of this category in addition to data mapping tools. Organizations must now support a range of delivery styles, latencies, and formats.
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BI is about "sense and respond." Analytics is about "anticipate and shape" models.

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Business Analytics 3.0 blog is meant for decision makers and managers who are trying to make sense of the rapidly changing technology landscape and build next generation solutions. It is aimed at helping business decision makers navigate the "Raw Data -> Aggregate Data -> Intelligence -> Insight -> Decisions" chain.